“Good morning. Got snow?” my text read.
I sent it to my 16-year-old daughter. She was knee-deep in a ski trip to North Carolina with a youth group from Memorial Presbyterian. They were hitting the slopes at Beech mountain and hunkered down in their cabins the night a winter storm named Izzy pounded the East Coast. It dumped white stuff all across the region, blanketing that corner of the world in snowdrifts and winter scenes that seem like a fairy tale when you’re from a place they call “the Sunshine State.”
Got snow?!? Oh yeah, they got snow.
The weather map in North Carolina showed precipitation levels in colors I had never seen before. In Florida, we gets greens and yellows, and when it’s really bad, reds. But this was a kind of baby blue mixed with some type of neon pink. “Does that mean radiation leak?” I wondered.
No, it means “butt buried in snow.”
Lots of snow. Where they measure accumulation in inches, or even feet. When the roads are impassible, and you open your cabin door to be met with the giggly white stuff just beckoning you to dive in and bathe in it.
A sea of it. As far as the eye could see. And because you’re a 16-year-old kid who doesn’t have to worry about how to get home or whether you’re going to have to eat frozen woodland critters to survive, it’s the most glorious thing ever.
Ah, so lucky. Got snow!
I’ve always dreamed of snow. Being stuck in the mountains with thick snowdrifts that roll like ocean waves. The sledding. The snowball fights. Just trudging around in it until your toes turn black and your teeth chatter themselves free.
We never had such luck when I was a kid. That was the curse of being from Tampa, Florida.
About the only time you ever saw snow was when the TV didn’t get good reception.
My dad would take my brother and me off to North Carolina or Tennessee during the winter months. We dreamed of snowscapes and toboggan rides and riding elk through banks of snow as tall as rooftops.
The reality was usually a gray, frigid landscape where the only ice was some dirty chunk we found in a roadside ditch. It was usually just something someone dumped out of the cooler of their RV.
We would go “skiing” near Gatlinburg, Tenn., on slopes that looked more like a NASCAR track than a snowy ski run. It was battleship gray. Black even. Hard-packed and gravelly. Poor, wheezing snow blowers desperately tried to lay down a layer of white stuff. But the gray earth gobbled it up the minute it touched the ground and froze it solid to the rest of that cratered moonscape of ice.
Skiing in such conditions was beyond challenging, especially for novices whose entire experience was once watching bobsledding on the Winter Olympics. Instructors tried to teach us skills like snowplowing to stop, why using trees to brake was a life-altering experience and how to turn at 90 mph. But most of these things required fresh, powdery snow. We faced a mange-ridden mountain that was black ice with tufts of barren earth poking up like islands. It was an obstacle course from hell.
The ski lift would eject us at the top of the mountain into a crumpled heap of humanity. Once I managed to untangle myself from all the other dolts and reclaimed my skis, I would find I had someone else’s. On my left would be an adult-sized ski the length of a school bus, and on my right, a kiddie ski with the back part torn off like it had been bit by a shark.
No matter. I was about to die anyway. What did it matter what my equipment looked like?
I lined myself up on the edge of the mountain. It was never one of the easy slopes. The thing about kids from Florida is the incredible confidence we displayed when we were so obviously out of our depth.
“I can do this!” I said to myself through deep breaths. “I can do this!”
And just as I realized I COULDN’T do this, and was about to bail out for the bunny slopes, some wobbly clown would barrel into me and send me careening down the mountain.
I remember nothing of skiing. Skiing is an act. It is a graceful ballet that balances the pull of gravity with the flowing artistry of a controlled, zig-zagging decent. It is a beautiful thing, and people often smile.
What I remember is that the world turned sideways and my underwear felt warm and moist. Trees seemed to grew horizontally here, and I didn’t know up from down. I became aware that you can reach such speeds so high that oxygen cannot keep up. That you can scream in an octave the normal ear cannot register. That skis on gravelly ice sounds like a dump truck crashing into a wall. That if you slam into someone at these speeds, you won’t have time to apologize. You can do that later when you share a hospital room. And that the orange netting at the bottom of the hill is equal parts salvation and pain as your face tries to squeeze through the little holes.
And then … you go again. Because you’re a Floridian, and you’ve dreamed about this your entire life. You’re not sure if you’ll ever get the chance again.
Which is why I felt such joy when I texted “Got snow?” that morning and knew that the weather map’s radiation-like blues and pinks meant she did. Giant oceans of it. As far as the eye could see. A Florida kid’s dream. Someone else could worry about how to get home in it. All that really mattered was how quickly you could dive into it, and just savor it until your toes turned black and your teeth chattered themselves free.